Cain’s Paine

Who knew that all you need to be president of the United States is a modicum of common sense? All year, the candidates for the Republican nomination have been touting their intimate relationship with this humdrum way of seeing the world. Michele Bachmann claimed that “everything I needed to know in life I learned in Iowa,” which she left at the age of 12. Rick Perry told Iowans that unlike the current president, he doesn’t have a lot of interest in “studies” when it comes to restoring economic health. “We know what the problem is,” he said. “It’s not magic, it is actually common sense.” We shouldn’t “spend all the money.” Even decidedly unfolksy Mitt Romney announced this week at a gathering of Americans for Prosperity, “I believe we can save Social Security with a few common-sense reforms.”

But no candidate has tried harder to link himself to this everyday pragmatism than Herman Cain, the former C.E.O. of Godfather’s Pizza, whose “Common Sense Solutions” bus tour functions as the centerpiece of his “unconventional” campaign. And no one has been pushing the connection longer. More than a decade before his fellow Tea Party star, Glenn Beck, offered up his best-selling “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense,” a 2009 rewrite of Thomas Paine’s great pamphlet, Cain had already published a how-to book called “Leadership is Common Sense.” He had also granted himself the title “President of the University of Common Sense” on his radio show in Atlanta. For Cain, common sense has come close to a mantra, one that is regularly repeated by his fans as well.

The tagline is showing more than a little wear and tear at the moment — despite Cain’s best efforts to keep it alive. Over the past few days, he’s tried hard to contrast himself not only with with political strategists, who have turned choosing a president into “an absurd game,” but also with “a troubled woman” whose “false accusations,” he claimed, “exceed common sense and certainly the standards of decency in America.”

It’s been a problem for a while. First came Cain’s catchy 9-9-9 tax plan, which upon closer analysis seemed less like basic common sense than a giant obfuscation intended to benefit the very rich. Next there was that loony web ad featuring Cain’s tobacco-compromised campaign manager. Nor should we forget Cain’s perplexing claim that China may be about to develop nuclear weapons. And at the very least, the sexual harassment allegations against him suggest anything but commonsensical workplace behavior.

And yet, according to many polls, Cain remains at the top of the G.O.P. field. A USA Today Poll conducted November 2-6 shows Romney and Cain in a dead heat. Quinnipiac University’s first Swing State Poll of the year, released on Thursday, has Cain in first place among Republican voters in Florida and Ohio and tied with Romney in Pennsylvania. His supporters seem, if anything, energized by the intense media scrutiny of their candidate, ready and eager to turn the story line to Cain’s favor. The Des Moines Register, for example, reported that a majority of Cain’s Iowan fans are standing by their candidate, casting blame instead on the liberal media for stirring up a story of no consequence and dubious veracity, and reaffirming their faith in Cain’s straight-talking ways. Asked to explain his enduring loyalty, Robert Kramer, 70, an Iowan Tea Party supporter, told the Register, “I have nothing against Mitt Romney, but I think Herman Cain has more common sense.”

So what do Cain’s supporters — and the candidate himself — actually mean when they repeat these seemingly empty claims? Despite his past as a successful Washington lobbyist, Cain entered the arena hoping to make a virtue of his ordinary-guy status. Not for him the self-interested doubletalk of the professional politician or the Washington insider. He similarly rejects the complex and often arcane findings of experts. “Manmade global warming is poppycock,” announced the former math and computer science student this summer, dismissing climate change in his characteristic mode as an invention of “scientists who tried to concoct the science” and “were busted because they manipulated the data.”

What Cain promises instead, with all his talk of “common sense solutions,” is the practicality and simplicity of the business world, itself imagined not as the realm of Wall Street finance or multinational Fortune 500 companies (both of which Cain also knows up close), but rather as the place where everyday know-how and the logic of the kitchen table prevail. Is the government low on funds? Then it should spend less. The dismissal of “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan”— as Cain famously described a nation of 28 million in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network — is a signal that, like anyone else outside the political arena, he knows better than to worry about the pronunciation of such irrelevant places.

Cain makes it sound as if this were a refreshing change of pace. But it’s really only garden-variety populism, a form of pandering and anti-intellectualism that has a long history in America, from Andrew Jackson to Sarah Palin, and which has often been used against comparatively cerebral political opponents, from John Quincy Adams to Barack Obama.

Traditionally, common sense has come in both right and left varieties. Cain’s signature accomplishment has been to attach the concept to the full range of contemporary conservative touchstones. In Cain’s telling, it is not just business executives and management types who embody “common sense leadership” and “common sense solutions.” It is also the Founding Fathers, whose Constitution set forth a limited number of “first principles” to which government should return. Ditto for Cain’s own father, a chauffeur in the Jim Crow South, who had little formal education but “a Ph.D. in common sense.”

Even Jesus receives a shout-out from the candidate. In a widely circulated blog posted last year on Red State, Cain casts the son of God as a prophet of contemporary conservatism who “taught without a script” and espoused “common sense parables” that “filled people with promise and compassion, his words forever inspiring”— without the benefit of a universal healthcare system, food stamps, unemployment benefits or any other government program.

But in the hands of Cain, common sense also signals a second populist theme, one that seems to run directly counter to his deeply partisan and often fiery political message. That is transcendence. Common sense also means those basic principles and assumptions upon which we can all agree — or would agree if we only got all the self-proclaimed experts and professional politicians out of the way. Cain wants us to believe he is espousing nothing more than the everyday wisdom that is the shared property of all genuine Americans, regardless of differences of class, religion, and, most significantly in his case, race. He may be a black man ranting against the government, a position that, history suggests, would likely land him on the political left. But his appeal to nothing more than common sense, when punctuated with humorous quips and blatant “misstatements” delivered in the cadences of a preacher, suggests that Cain refuses to think in today’s divisive terms.

The attraction of common sense as the foundation for political wisdom has long been that it says we’re all in this together — yet we can figure it out on our own, with only the basic resources we all naturally possess (another of Cain’s many self-help books is “C.E.O. of Self: You are in Charge”). And when that happens, we won’t need politics any longer. Sounding a populist chord that actually does go all the way back to Paine and 18th-century America, Cain offers up a radical political philosophy and promises it is the self-evident conclusion of a “professional problem solver.” Like Paine, he is the ordinary but singular man (and gifted rhetorician) who will finally get us beyond all our great divisions — rich and poor, white and black, right and left — and tell us how to fix a broken system.

Cain will not be our next president. Even without the sexual harassment scandal, he has neither the necessary funds nor the establishment clout. Plus he is profoundly unprepared for the job. But his strong appeal to a large sector of the American electorate is worth considering precisely because it reveals the strange state of populist politics in this moment of economic crisis and anti-government fervor.

Much of the Republican base remains angry, ready for a fight, and at the same time deeply utopian. Conservative pundits and politicians like Cain have gone a long way toward convincing much of the country that if it fights hard enough now, we might soon be back to first principles — and done with politics once and for all.

Sophia Rosenfeld is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and the author of “Common Sense: A Political History”

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.